Debunking Doubts That H.I.V. Causes AIDS

By GINA KOLATA

Published: March 11, 1993

Researchers have found evidence that contradicts what has become a tenet of a persistent but widely disparaged theory of the cause of AIDS: that recreational drug use and not the human immunodeficiency virus causes the deadly collapse of the immune system in people with AIDS.

In a commentary published today in Nature, the British science journal, researchers reported data showing that there is no relationship between recreational drug use, excluding intravenous drugs, and the development of AIDS.

The researchers said they had taken a new look at data collected in an eight-year study that began in 1984 in order to demolish the hypothesis that H.I.V. does not cause AIDS. The research team was led by Dr. Michael S. Ascher, an immunologist at the California Department of Health Services in Berkeley, and Dr. Warren Winkelstein Jr., an epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. Challenge Issued

Dr. Ascher and his colleagues wrote their paper in response to a challenge by Tom Bethell, a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, to compare people who took drugs with those who did not and see whether those who took drugs had a higher incidence of AIDS.

"This study has never been done," Mr. Bethell wrote in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 3. "Why not? Billions of dollars have been spent on AIDS research and little headway has been made. Perhaps, then, the wrong theory has been pursued."

Mr. Bethell discussed the theory proposed six years ago by Dr. Peter H. Duesberg, a molecular biologist at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Duesberg holds that AIDS is caused by something other than H.I.V. and that H.I.V. is instead an innocent bystander. He contends that AIDS is not an infectious disease and that the AIDS drug AZT hastens, rather than slows, the immune system's demise.

But, Dr. Ascher replied, such studies have been done by scientists in California and elsewhere who were suspicious of recreational drugs from the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Already Considered

"I felt a little embarrassed" to be going back to such familiar material, Dr. Ascher said. "This was one of the first things the scientific community looked at."

But, Dr. Ascher added, "Tom Bethell threw down the gauntlet," and he and his colleagues accepted the challenge and wrote their commentary.

Dr. Jerome Groopman, an AIDS researcher at New England Deaconess Hospital, said Dr. Ascher and his colleagues should be commended for their article. "Science keeps an open mind at all times, but there comes a time when you have to declare that the earth is not flat," he said. "It is incumbent on those who rejected H.I.V. to come to terms with this."

Dr. Duesberg, who refined his argument in January in an article in the journal Pharmacology and Therapeutics, said that the new data did not sway him in the least and that he had written a refutation of the Nature paper.

Dr. Duesberg conceded in a telephone interview yesterday that most academic scientists reject his hypothesis, but he said he nevertheless remains convinced that the most likely cause of AIDS is recreational drugs. "Galileo was alone when he started," he said. "So was Max Planck." Group Questions Standard

He also noted that 150 scientists in the United States and Europe had joined a group, headed by Dr. Charles Thomas, a retired molecular biologist from Harvard Medical School, that questions the standard view that H.I.V alone causes AIDS.

In their paper, Dr. Ascher and his colleagues described a direct test of the hypothesis that arose from their analysis of the San Francisco Men's Study, a group of 1034 randomly selected single men who lived in San Francisco and were 25 to 54 years old in 1984, when the study began. Every six months for eight years, the researchers examined the men, testing to determine whether they were infected with H.I.V. or had developed AIDS.

The investigators found that homosexuals and heterosexuals in the study were equally likely to use drugs. But 26 percent of the homosexuals developed AIDS, whereas none of the heterosexuals did. There were 204 cases of AIDS among the gay men and none among the heterosexual men, the investigators report. All of the men with AIDS were infected with H.I.V., but there was no relationship at all between drug use and AIDS.